For the rest of us life goes on, unfortunately. The removal vans are arriving this morning, so this is the last email I’ll ever have to send. We can no longer fool ourselves into thinking we’re needed in this increasingly unpleasant city. The government’s position is clear: let society find its own level and to hell with anyone who doesn’t come up to scratch. Dan Banbury tells me that a police constable can be replaced with a matchbox-sized surveillance camera. I’d like to see a drone sort out a domestic involving some paralytic pikey waving a knock-off Game of Thrones machete at his missus because she stood in front of the football.
‘Can he say “pikey” in a memo?’ asked Colin Bimsley as he read the email.
‘According to the dictionary it means “any person of low background”,’ said his colleague Meera Mangeshkar, checking her phone. ‘Probably an abbreviation from “turnpike-keeper”. Oh God, I’m looking up words even though old Bryant’s not around.’
Of course we can’t be allowed to remain open. Our mission is to prevent, not cure, and remove the long-term causes of public disorder. But prevention is an unaffordable luxury now, so they’re closing us down to save a few bob, and making London a bit more unbearable in the process.
You probably want to know if you still have jobs. I’m told that all staff will be notified about their employment options in due course. I understand that most of you are going to be reallocated to other specialist divisions, although I’m afraid they may not all be centrally located.
‘Not centrally located?’ cried Colin. ‘Is he having a Turkish? I’ll do anything for my job so long as it’s in Zone One. I’m not going up the arse-end of the tube map every day. Epping? That’s in the woods, isn’t it? Morden, well that’s from Lord of the Rings and Theydon Bois sounds suspiciously French. Not on my watch.’
‘It won’t be your watch much longer,’ said Meera. ‘What if the only job you’re offered isn’t in London at all?’
‘What do you mean, not in London?’ Colin replied, genuinely mystified.
So that’s it. The unit is now officially shut.
Your contracts don’t expire until the end of the month but you’re free to go off and enjoy yourselves. Summer’s just around the corner. The King’s Cross drug-dealers have already started wearing shorts. The two Daves are staying on, having been hired to refurbish this dump, which is now set to become a ‘plant-based tapas bar’, whatever that is. It seems we wasted years training as law enforcement specialists when we should have been learning how to put sprouts on sticks.
It seems I am the only one who’ll be left without a new position, which suits me perfectly as I plan to retire and go as far off the grid as possible, in this case a bungalow with faulty wiring on the Isle of Wight. I no longer want to live in a metropolis that thinks it’s acceptable to charge fifteen quid for a cup of artisanal coffee that’s been passed through the digestive system of a tapir.
Adding insult to injury, I have received a letter of complaint that our most senior detectives used inappropriate language during the last investigation and are guilty of being, I quote, ‘old white males in a woke world’. I don’t know about ‘woke’ but Mr Bryant certainly needs to be woken in our meetings. I imagine being old and white is somewhat beyond his control unless he’s planning to reincarnate.
You may have noticed there’s an unfamiliar name attached to the recipients at the top of the page. Sidney Hargreaves is a girl. She’s happy to be called either Sid or Sidney because her name is, I quote, ‘non-gender specific in an identity-biased profession’. It’s not for me to pass comment on gender, I got lost somewhere between Danny La Rue and RuPaul. She was due to start this week as an intern. Her scores from Henley College were exceptional but came with a warning that she is ‘unusual’, so she was assigned to a unit where she could be rehabilitated by like-minded people, which suggests that they see the PCU as a mental facility-cum-toy hospital.
As you can see, it’s not all good news this week. Wherever you’re relocated to, I’m given to understand that you’ll be reverting to your former job titles, as your upgrades were never fully ratified before the wheels fell off our investigation. Feel free to take it up with your union representative, i.e. me.
On to practical matters. The evidence room will need clearing out today, and I think we should do it before anyone else sees what we’re up to. I don’t want our so-called superiors finding out about Mr Bryant’s little witchcraft museum. As for the staff fridge, I know it’s the only temperature-controlled device we own but leaving a human nose in the salad crisper is going to attract the wrong sort of attention. Dan tells me it’s being stored until it can be examined for teeth-marks, so for now it’s in a sandwich box in the kitchen. Don’t do what I nearly did.
I think we might also consider shredding certain internal files, as some of our recent investigations read like a fantasia on policing themes. If they get out we’ll be a laughing stock.
Make sure last month’s log entries are legible and put your stuff into boxes. Don’t think about nicking anything. The black market Chinese brandy in the evidence room did not diminish ‘due to evaporation’ as someone with Colin’s handwriting scrawled on the label.
To be honest, I never imagined we would end up like this. I thought we’d probably get blown up or quarantined again, not quietly closed down and moved on because of a compromised operation. It’s undignified. Three decades in the force, I finally get some grudging acclaim and you have to go and stuff it up. I don’t wish to apportion blame, but it’s entirely your fault.
Good luck in the future, what’s left of it.
Land felt like dropping his head to the desk. Take a deep breath, he told himself. He was free at last. Free to go and sit in his bungalow in Ventnor, watching grey clouds decant themselves on to an even greyer sea. He should have been over the moon yet he did not feel, in Churchill’s phrase, the exhilaration of a man shot at without result. Quite the reverse. It felt as if he had taken John May’s bullet himself.
The future suddenly looked ghastly. He had nothing more to put in his memo, no protestations about the capricious plumbing, no suggestions for the unit’s monthly film night, no complaints about Colin eating durian fruit at his desk or Meera wearing her pyjamas on late shifts or Bryant causing the video entry system to pick up old Carry On films or Janice leaving the cat’s litter tray in the operations room, because there would be no more films or working nights and anyway the cat was dead.
I’m not sure I want to live on the Isle of Wight after all, he thought. This may be a ridiculous anachronistic dead-end job in a government department that should have been closed down decades ago, but it’s my dead-end job and I’m rather proud of it.
Then fight for it, said a small voice inside him. Some poor mug has to get us out of this mess.
It’s just not going to be me.
Pushing back his drooping comb-over, he hit send.
2
Cooking the Books
MAKING A MURDERER
I’ve always known there was something wrong with me.
The knowledge was stuck beneath my skin like a thorn, right from the time of my earliest memories. On my first day of school at Albion Mixed Infants in Deptford, South London, I was shaking with fear, trying not to wet my shorts. The teacher, Miss Piper, introduced me to the class and asked who would like to share their bench and poster paints. Not one hand went up. They had seen the way I walked, with my elbows raised and a rolling gait like a sailor on a storm-swept deck, or a dressed-up chimpanzee performing for an old-time circus, and started whispering behind their hands.
Finally Miss Piper made the best of it and set me up on my own with a jigsaw of a pet-shop window that only had about fifteen pieces, and I thought to myself: Is she a moron? We were supposed to be playing for three-quarters of an hour and the jigsaw took me ten seconds to finish, so what was I supposed to do then?
But the teacher was talking to the children who didn’t make her feel uncomfortable, so I surreptitiously st
ole another child’s poster paints, turned the completed jigsaw over and painted a fairly decent landscape on the other side.
I got sent to the head teacher’s office for damaging school property.
I won’t bore you with my difficult formative years. It’s enough to know that I was shunned in the playground, avoided during team selection, bullied in class and usually ended up hiding in the library, where I would read murder mysteries and books about magic until it was time to go home. At the age of eleven I was fitted with a black rubber brace that would straighten my leg over time, but I hated wearing it because it chafed away at my skin, leaving crescent-shaped callouses, so I often left it off.
I was never a comfortable child. My clothes never fitted properly; my hair was cut at home; I didn’t have nice stuff.
My mother couldn’t collect me from school because going-home time fell in the middle of her shift at the supermarket, so I walked home alone. I was usually ambushed somewhere along the way, and quickly learned to keep my money in separate pockets so that I wouldn’t lose all of it.
I was supposed to exercise for at least half an hour every day, and was nearly always alone. If anyone had asked what I remembered most about being young I would have said walking by myself in the rain. I preferred the empty backstreets of rough neighbourhoods where none of the other kids in my class would dare to follow me.
My mother was harassed and panicked and worn threadbare by work. No matter how many hours she put in she was always broke because she surrendered her wages to whichever bullying thug had currently latched on to her. She cried a lot. One day she explained why I was different. She told me about the Event.
I wished she hadn’t.
After that I was pretty much uncontrollable. I was thrown out of schools for being disruptive (I learned too fast and grew impatient, then became bored and angry). I began wearing my brace over my clothes so that people could see I was proud of being different. I exaggerated my rolling walk and made myself stand out until I provoked fights. I learned to punch first. I did not get good grades, and then I stopped going to school altogether. It had never been easy because we never stayed in one place very long. I was smart, but self-taught, and applied to colleges. But my thinking was undisciplined. I could not conform.
My mother’s death brought my childhood to an abrupt end. An aunt arranged the funeral, then conveniently disappeared. I was left not knowing what would happen to me.
It turned out my mother owed money to everyone. I found a shoebox full of unpaid bills under her bed. Her few relatives had long ago disowned her. One night men from a debt collection agency tried to break in, so I left for good. Broke and friendless, I was forced to squat in an empty mildew-smelling council flat off the Old Kent Road.
Begging for small change in the piss-reeking underpass of the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre is lower than most of you will ever go. I became obsessed with the idea of taking back control of my life, but try getting anywhere without spare cash or special abilities. I needed to find someone with money. I knew how to make friends in theory: you help someone, joke with them, make them trust you – but I had never been able to put it into practice. That was when I discovered I had a gift of cracking life’s problems by turning each of them into a puzzle that needed to be solved. By looking at them differently.
I am the child of many fathers and part of me died before I was born, so it seemed only fair that six should die to bring about my rebirth. I had no lover, no friend, no brother to stay by my side and keep my resolve, but I had learned from an early age to think for myself and trust no one.
I worked on my plan and made strategic alliances with people who would unwittingly help me to fulfil it. I stole his watch and her laptop and their savings, and arranged it so that no one was ever looking in my direction when it happened. I studied everything I needed to know and a lot I didn’t. It was a long journey filled with dangers that took me from the derelict church all the way to the burning bookshop.
I should have known that books would be the cause of all the trouble.
Bookshops suit the austere grey terraces of Bloomsbury. At dusk they glow invitingly with yellow light and warmth. The bookshop in Bury Place was called Typeface, a small double-fronted brick house with windows framed in grey-painted wood, its interior finished in the kind of muted natural colours favoured by fashionable independent shops. Its left-hand display was reserved for bright bestsellers about family secrets uncovered in Mediterranean climes, while the right side was kept back for academic publications, debuting authors, greeting cards and rubber stamps. It made very little profit, even in bookish Bloomsbury. On a wet Monday night it was deserted outside and should have been dark inside, but George Bernard Shaw was on fire.
The splash of blue flame flickered up and spread quickly along the tops of the bookcases from Plays (Pygmalion, first edition, £4,500) to Bolshevism (The Legacy of Lenin, 3 vols, slightly foxed) to Avant-Garde Poetry (Why We Scream, damaged frontispiece, £6 ono). Then it spilled in a fiery waterfall on to the General Fiction shelves. As it fanned and flooded out across the freshly varnished floorboards, the flyers on the cork noticeboards scorched and lifted free of their drawing pins, spiralling upwards in the blackening calyx of hot air. There was a pop of glass and a soft whoosh of drawn heat.
The sprinklers failed to open because some idiot had painted over them, and the ground floor became an inferno. When the windows blasted out into the street the fire’s grip on the little shop tightened. Before the emergency services could reach the scene all was lost. It didn’t help that one of the finest fire stations in the area was now a fashionable brasserie.
Senior Fire Officer Blaize Carter had been off-shift, and arrived just as the flames were being brought under control. The first floor of the narrow building was still dense with oily smoke. The ground-floor ceiling had carbonized and was starting to sag. Carter and her team drew back as someone pointed up at the roof. A stack of orange clay chimneypots, appearing to defy gravity, was leaning gracefully and falling slowly inwards, taking most of the roof tiles and attic beams with it.
The fall of wood and brick slammed down to the first floor, releasing the bookshop’s heavy ceiling. The plaster put out the last of the flames but filled the building with dust, increasing the danger of reignition. The ground floor was given more water. What the flames hadn’t damaged, the hoses obliterated.
‘There was nobody in there,’ one of the lads came over to tell her, Sandy someone, a nice kid based at Shaftesbury Avenue. Carter remembered him because nobody was called Sandy any more and he looked about fifteen. ‘We’ve checked the buildings on either side; they’re both empty.’
Carter wedged a yellow glove under her arm and matched the building against the diagram on her phone. The department knew every building in its ward and could theoretically summon up their fire-safety plans, except that the app rarely loaded properly. ‘Built in 1702. All wood beams and lath and plaster ceilings. Incredible.’
‘Sorry?’ The lad looked at her, missing something.
She glanced over at him. ‘Incredible that it survived three centuries of candlelight, gas mantles and dodgy electrics, only to burn down in an era of cold-light LEDs and electronic sprinkler systems. It’s a listed building. The paperwork will be a nightmare. Queen Anne was on the throne when this place was built. I hope none of her chairs were still in there.’
‘Think it was an insurance job?’ Sandy looked back at the billowing black smoke.
‘Books? I doubt it. Dry paper is always a disaster. Ever hear of Paternoster Row?’
‘No.’
‘No reason why you should, I suppose. It was a three-hundred-year-old street of stationers and bookshops just behind St Paul’s. It went up with a roar they heard streets away. Burning paper everywhere. Wiped clean by a stray bomb during the Blitz. The firefighters couldn’t get near it. This isn’t clean. I can smell linseed oil.’ She sniffed the acrid atmosphere. ‘Something else too. Citrus. Aftershave?’ She crinkled he
r nose. ‘Nope, it’s gone.’
As water flooded back out of the ground floor she broke protocol by setting aside her breath-pack and climbing through the shop’s smashed window in her yellow headgear and gloves. The breathing apparatus was essential for deep exploration – it gave a whistle when it was running out of air – but this little place only went back a few dozen yards. Once, far inside a warehouse, an acetylene tank had exploded in a storage room and melted one side of her helmet. It had taken two months for her hair to grow back. The bookshop’s scorching air stank of blistered varnish, but underneath it was another unmistakeable smell, much stronger now.
Oranges.
The fall of rubble from the roof had bowed the exposed ceiling beams of the ground floor. She stepped forward, tapping her steel-capped boot on the boards as she went, making sure they were solid enough to take her weight. The fire had not reached the basement, so it had presumably started here on the ground floor and flared upwards via the wooden staircases.
She glanced back. They were supposed to have two crews, one to extinguish, the other to search, but staffing problems had left them short. Lately, too many of her friends had quit.
There was an ominous yawn of stretching timber from above. The first floor now had the weight of the second plus the roof on it, so it was time to get out. As she crunched back over broken glass and soaked paper she saw the line of primary ignition clearly etched on the floor, running like a meandering black river from the bookcases at the back of the shop to the front. Oil had been poured straight from a can, its flow mimicking the walk of the carrier. Arson wasn’t uncommon, but in a place like this it didn’t make sense.
Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons Page 2
